Tag Archives: hierarchies

Antony has done a bit of magic, considerably speeding up inserts. Since the base implementation does not have persistence, insert speed is particularly important. Copying the 2×89,051 edges for the Tree-of-Life example is now near-instant.

The delete bug has been fixed.

There’s a new Maze example in the OQGRAPH trunk on Launchpad, first introduced in my MySQL University session. I created/inserted a maze of 1 million rooms (that comes to about 3 million edges), and OQGRAPH found the shortest path (122330 steps for this particular maze) in abound one second. That’s pretty good, I think!

Last but not least, the OurDelta builds of MySQL 5.0.87-d10 have been published (for all Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS/RHEL, generic) and the -Sail edition of the packages have OQGRAPH built-in. So if you use 5.0 or just want to play, it’s now very easy to get started!

Earlier in the week we received a message from an early OQGRAPH adopter, telling how he’s using it to manage paths in his IP network: calculations that would previously require many minutes are now completed in a fraction of a second and a single query. He admitted to be pretty much an all Oracle shop, with this OQGRAPH app being his first exploration of MySQL space. He loves OQGRAPH, and I suppose that by proxy implies he likes MySQL too

The GRAPH engine allows you to deal with hierarchies and graphs in a purely relational way. So, we can find all children of an item, path from an item to a root node, shortest path between two items, and so on, each with a simple basic query structure using standard SQL grammar.

The engine is implemented as a MySQL/MariaDB 5.1 plugin (we’re working on a 5.0 backport for some clients) and thus runs with an unmodified server.

Demo time! I’ll simplify/strip a little bit here for space reasons, but what’s here is plain cut/paste from a running server, no edits

-- find us all people we can get to from potter (3)
select origid,group_concat(people.name order by seq) as destinations
from foo join people on (foo.linkid=people.id)
where latch=1 and origid=3;
+--------+----------------+
| origid | destinations |
+--------+----------------+
| 3 | mulcahy,potter |
+--------+----------------+
-- find us all people from where we can get to hoolihan (4)
select origid,group_concat(people.name order by seq) as origins
from foo join people on (foo.linkid=people.id)
where latch=1 and destid=4;
+--------+--------------------------+
| origid | origins |
+--------+--------------------------+
| 4 | hoolihan,hunnicut,pearce |
+--------+--------------------------+

So, there you have it. A graph (in this case a simple unidirectional tree, aka hierarchy) that looks like a table to us, as do the resultsets that have been computed.

This is still a early implementation, we’re still enhancing the storage efficiency (in memory) and speed, and adding persistence. We’re also looking for a suitable large dataset that would allow us to seriously test the system, find bugs and assess speed. If you happen to have a large hierarchical structure, but especially a social graph you could obfuscate and give to us, that would be great!

Also, if you’re interested in deploying the GRAPH engine or have questions or additional needs, we’d be happy to talk with you.